Tokyo mash-ups, getting ‘signed’ & some news from Blurb.com

And on the second day, Alfie created a book cover. Yep, reckon this shot [above] is gonna be the cover of a book about street photography I am preparing. Only shot another six of these multiple exposure photographs today but I like this one. Reminds me a little of some of the collage work that Moholy-Nagy was doing in the 1920s, although I am no Lazslo.

After posting the first piece about shooting these multiple exposures with the Nikon, I wanted to get some quality time today to mess around a lot more. As it happened, the weather was dreadful and whilst that doesn’t really discourage me from shooting, taking time over shooting, spending time to select the subjects, compose, think about the placement of each frame within the concept of the whole thing… that’s not really something to get much fun out of when it’s pissing down with rain.

So, just another six today… three of which are here, cos they are the ones that worked best.Click each to get the bigger version.

The first two were made on the last leg of my walk home, shooting six times to construct the pictures you see. I was interested to explore the idea of a composite photo, made up of the last 500yards of my walk to the house. The ‘auto gain’ setting was set to ‘on'; it’s seriously the only way of getting something that looks halfway decent without too much hassle.

This evening, some hours after getting home and interested to start making a book with one of these shots as its cover, I discovered some great news about some new stuff going on at Blurb.com. If you don’t know Blurb, it’s a company doing on-demand book printing. You make the book, you upload it to them via their off/online software and the book sits in their shop as well as being something you or your friends can order one copy or a hundred copies at a time. Cool. I did a book for a client a while back and I was impressed with the quality.

But, the issue with Blurb at that time was the fact that Booksmart – their book creation software – only took high-rez JPEG files as its input. I am a perfectionist and I like delivering quality stuff for my clients. So, I built templates in InDesign – with all the correct bleed settings based on Blurb’s book sizes – and then did a JPEG export from InDesign. Those JPEGs I uploaded through Booksmart but did so very comfortable in the fact that I had built the thing millimetre perfect in InDesign and that I wasn’t going to get any nasty surprises and get a book back with 1mm of white down each page where they’d cut it in the wrong place.

So, tonight I logged into Blurb for a quick look to refresh myself about the sizes of their books only to discover a new service called PDF to Book. Download a program which then integrates itself with InDesign CS3, CS4 or CS5 and you have a very simple way of setting up page templates for every size, finish and style of book that Blurb make.

Oh.. and I almost forgot: I got taken on by an agency today, who will now be representing my work for gallery, print and commercial reproduction; first in Asia but then globally. Editorial and one or two other areas where I sell work are still mine but as far as anything printed is concerned, these folk will be dealing with it.

There’s talk of a solo exhibition in the offing this year in Tokyo for which I will get a book out to coincide with. It’s all very exciting.

About Japanorama

Japanorama is run by British professional photographer, Alfie Goodrich, and provides practical photography teaching in Tokyo. Weekly workshops, group and one-to-one lessons bring together photographers of all ages and abilities.